This year is a special year, the U.S, experienced the unprecedented COVID pandemic, the Black Lives Matter Protest, what’s more, it is also an election year. The winner of an election will shape the U.S. in every way in the next four years. The stake is high. This project is to explore voters’ behavior during 1988 and 2016, specifically, who thought black people are getting less than what they deserved and should have more rights in the society.
First, let’s do a history review, below is the timeline of voting rights in the U.S. check the full version out here.
1920: Women are guaranteed the right to vote by the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
1965: The Voting Rights Act of 1965. Protection of voter registration and voting for racial minorities, later applied to language minorities. It is considered one of the most far-reaching pieces of civil rights legislation in U.S. history.
1971: Adults aged 18 through 21 are granted the right to vote.
Based on the voting rights changes listed above. I select these years’ suvery that contain questions we are interested: 1988, 1992, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016.
In general, the differences between Democrat and Republican are not large, except for 2008 (president Obama), the difference was 0.25. Sometimes one party may have a greater number of popular votes, or the total percentage of votes cast for a presidential candidate. The election result doesn’t represent the outcome of the popular vote. One example was the election in 2016, the Democrat had 3% more in popular vote than the Republican’s. Contrary to medias expectations, Republican won the election. That was because of the U.S. system depends on electoral college, instead of the popular vote.
One interesting finding here was in 2012. Most of black people voted for Democrat (Obama). In the same year, white people tend to vote for Republican. Both of these percentages were very close, but still there was a higher percentage for white people who voted for the Republican. For other races, the percentage of population voted for Democrat was higher than Republican in general.
Another interesting finding was in 2016, for all races except White, there was higher percentage of the population voted for Democrat rather than Republican.
Conditions Make it Difficult for Blacks to Succeed?
Blacks Should Not Have Special Favors to Succeed?
The two plots above show the same information, but from different perspectives.
Of those who strongly agree, most are White, but since there are more White respondents in the survey, we can’t easily tell what is the general opinion of people in different race groups. so, we need to take a look at the second plot.
On the second graph we can see the precetages of White, Asian or Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaska Native and Other race who (strongly agree and somewhat disagree) and (strongly disagree and somewhat disagree) are similar. On the other hand, the majority of Black people strongly or somewhat agree with it; also, the percentage of Hispanic people who agree is higher than those who disagree.
According to the results above, I selected these questions that are most representative for the opinion on if black people have the rights they deserve:
Do you agree Blacks Should Not Have Special Favors to Succeed? keep those neither agree or disagree, disagree somewhat and disagree strongly
Do you agree Blacks Gotten Less than They Deserve Over the Past Few Years? keep those agree strongly, agree somewhat, neither agree nor disagree
In American Politics, Blacks’ Influence? keep those just about the right amount, too little influence
Aid to Blacks Scale (1 - 7 scale) keep those who chose ‘1. Government should help minority groups/blacks’, ‘2’, ‘3’ and ‘9. DK; haven’t thought much about it’.
Race: among all people in each race group, there are 18.75% of the Black, 18.1% of other or multiple races, 13.7% of Asian or Pacific Islander, 12.8% of Hispanic, 7.6% of White and 5.7% American Indian or Alaska Native.
Gender: 9.8% of male, 10.7% of female and 50% of other.
Education: 5.7% of grade or less people, 7.2% of high school people, 9.4% of some college people and 15.4% of college or advanced degree people are agree with more rights for black. We can see people with higher degree are tend to agree with the idea.
Age: 15.4% of aged 17 - 24 people, 12.3% of aged 25 - 34 people, 10.5% of aged 35 - 44 people, 9.5% of 45 - 54 people, 9.4% of 55 - 64 people, 8.8% of 65 - 74 people and 5.4% of 75 - 99 people. In general, young people are more likely to agree with the idea.
As shown on the plot above, among these people, 74.6% of them voted for Democrat, 16.6% of them did not vote or voted but not for president and only 5.5% of them voted for Republican. And based on the voting results of blacks over years, the precentage voted for Democrat is always higher than Republican’s.
From another aspect, among all Democrat’s voters, 18.4% of them think black people did not get what they deserve and need to be given more help and rights, and only 1.8% of Republican’s voters have the same idea.
Based on the analysis above, voters who cares about Black people’s equal rights are more likely to vote for Demorcrat, and their characteristics are probably black or multiple races or asian or pacific islander, has college or advanced degree and age between 17 and 34. However, the result is a general case and summerized from the ANES survey result, which can be bias, and definately not a standard to tell who will stand up for equal rights for minority ethnic. There can be people race is White or people don’t have a college degree or people above age 35 or people voted for Republican and also fighting for minority ethnic people’s rights.